This is a practice novel that I wrote to get beyond any mental block of writing a novel-length piece of fiction. Visit to an Ancient World was inspired by the Star Trek fanfics “Visit to a Weird Planet” and “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited”. There, as here, crews and “real” characters switched places.

While this is ostensibly about having Gabrielle’s fictional actor doppelganger getting relocated into Greece, it was also an excuse for me to get to play in the world of my beloved classics: the Gods are real; Xena is the sociopath you’d expect; and, as Mary Renault often did, some of the mythologicals are a little more grounded in real-world possibilities than legend…but that doesn’t make them any less lethal.

The rough draft was posted unedited and close to “live” to show what a piece of work looks like that comes straight off my fingertips. I did this as a kind of guide to beginning writers to see that first drafts aren’t pretty. They have typos (especially from a mild dyslexic), missing words, writer bugaboos (passive voice, repetitive place-holder words, etc.), plot changes, sentence fragments, and a myriad of other problems. First drafts are not pretty.